User talk:FGuerino/Information technology industry

Feedback from user MLauba

As requested, here are a few observations on the article project as it stands today.

• Overall, this project seems to have a bit of an identity crisis, in the sense that it claims to be about the IT industry but then mixes in many things that should be in different articles, most notably Information technology. I read up a bit on the talk page of the latter, and while I understand where this one is coming from, stuffing things that belong in an article about IT in this one makes for a confusing draft that is all over the place. The whole narrative needs to be tightened up. Eric Corbett made one immensely important point in one of your discussions. An article should be about one topic, not three or four. As a result, this draft goes all over the place.

I intentionally left responding to this section, for last.

Regarding the identity crisis, I think the conversations started out that way but, after looking at the list of industries, it became clear that there is no article on the IT industry, at all, and that adding one could be very useful. However, the identity crisis happens because the term "Information Technology" can be used to represent many things, something I try to clear up with explicit examples, early in the article, and with pointers to other WP articles that address the other contexts. After spending time working on this article and understanding more details about the information technology article, I believe that it's the information technology article that fails to cleanly stick to one topic, which is IT in the context of Information and Communications Technology. I recommend that article be cleaned up, especially since it's only rated as a "Start Class" article.

Regarding your point that the whole article needs to be tightened up... I took this to heart as I tried to address all of your feedback bullets, below. While I can't guarantee that the results are perfect, I sure have been working hard to try and do so. I think your feedback was very valuable in my attempts to do so. So, thanks very much for everything. Also, I spent a lot of time reading and understanding highly rated articles (A Class, B Class, Good Articles, Featured Articles, etc.) to learn about what makes good articles. I've tried my best to apply the same traits and patterns to this article. Hopefully, I've had some success and we can use this as a baseline that is better than a Start Class article and that can be improved by the community, as it moves forward.

By the way, I spent a lot of time reading through and evaluating all of the WP Industry articles and I noticed that most are graded as Stub Class and Start Class because they barely have more than a few words in each article (Take a look for yourself). I've tried my best to be as comprehensive as possible and closely follow WP's traits for what makes a WP good article. I hope I've had some level of success.

Thanks, again, for all your time and effort in providing feedback. I appreciate your doing so. --FGuerino (talk) 17:21, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Differing uses of the phrase IT - there's no real point with this section. The lede already makes it clear that it addresses item #3. If the reader is interested in IT or IT organizations he is unlikely to look up the IT industry article

Actually, I respectfully disagree with you on this one. The term "Information Technology" has three widely accepted definitions... 1) IT the Technology. 2) IT the organizations that provide and support solutions for Technology. And, 3) IT the industry. "Searchers," therefore, can be searching on the term in any one of the three contexts, either clearly aware of the other contexts or not knowing that they exist at all (and therefore needing to be educated on any contexts they're not aware of). If a person lands on the Information technology page, while looking for IT as the industry and finding IT as a technology, how would he or she possibly know to look somewhere else for IT the Industry? The fact is that unless it's spelled out for them, they won't. So, please don't feel offended or upset if respectfully I disagree with your feedback on this subject. I'm certainly open to other options but I just don't see any better ones, yet. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 01:24, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

• Alternate representations - These don't seem to pertain to the IT industry at all.

I changed the section title and content from Alternate representations to Closely related industries. --FGuerino (talk) 22:21, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

• Classification - I see what you're trying to say, but more fundamentally: what's the point?

The point (and I'm saying this more so I can find ways to clarify it for purposes of cleaning up the section than for countering your question) is to get the readers to understand that there is no industry without classification of an industry, as the classifications are what allow the tracking, measuring, and analyzing of any industry, which is why so much is invested in doing so for each industry. What makes an industry is the understanding of that industry and the understanding can't happen without such classifications, otherwise the industry is nothing more than one big blob of companies buying and selling, with no understanding of sizing, movement, or patterns within the blob. It's the classifications that help make sense of the blob, so to speak. Anyhow, I tried to restructure the entire classifications section into one master section with a more controlled lead-in, into each subclassification section, with more verbiage around the purpose and use of each. --FGuerino (talk) 14:43, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

• Industry by enterprise size should probably be called market segmentation

I took a look at this and, while I'm willing to change the title to something more informative, I disagree with your recommendation that it should be "market segmentation." The reason is that all classifications are forms of market segmentation, where the term "segmentation" means the breaking down by certain traits. Also, since you recommended this, i've added a bunch of industry classifications, as per sources that recognize all forms, so I feel that all these other classifications only help support that the word "segmentation" doesn't seem to fit properly. However, I've renamed and regrouped a number of sections in an attempt to address a number of your feedback items, including bringing more order to the article so, hopefully, this helped. In the mean time, I'll keep looking for better titling but, for now, I'm using segmentation/classification titles that come right from the sources and that are also widely recognized throughout the industry (especially since the sources are so pervasive). This is clearly a tough item to address properly. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 00:35, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

• Lifecycle: You mention "four key areas" and "four stages" but list five. Also, how is this specific to the IT industry? It again seems more about markets than the industry

Good catch. Thank you! I corrected the number to 5. I also added verbiage that helps explain the importance of technology lifecycle (at the end of the section). Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 00:35, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

• Industry sectors - pick one. The definitions are superfluous and sometimes sound patronizing - just wikilinking to their corresponding article will do the trick

I agree the use of the term "sectors" is too vague. I went back into the sources and found that they simply referred to the concept as classification or segmentation by product or deliverable types. So this, I corrected. However, on your recommendation to just wikilink to other areas to avoid the existing definitions, this doesn't seem to work well because I checked and there are no real Wiki pages on such topics to link to. I think there has to be a way to improve the existing definitions (which come right from the sources) so I'll take some time and see if I can come up with a means of doing so, or if anyone else provides some ideas on the topic that might help. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 01:02, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

• As a follow-up, once you pick one of these definitions, what are you going to do with it? Eg. datacenter systems: this one could further be broken down into servers, storage and networking. From there, what technologies compete in that space, and who are the players?

I addressed this with a complete restructuring of all the classification sections. Originally, there were three major classification sections that had no cohesiveness in the article. What I've done is to create a single cohesive section that wraps all areas of classification and I've spent more time explaining the purpose and use of the classifications. I'm sure it's not perfect but I believe it reads better. However, i'll keep working on it as I think your point is a good one. Readers need to understand things like the purpose, use and impacts of such classifications. --FGuerino (talk) 14:37, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

• Industry by hosting type: The Cloud computing article is already a dreafully convoluted mess that goes all over the place. Adding yet more definitions here makes the matter worse.

I took a look at the Cloud Computing article and I agree that it goes all over the place. I can't speak to how that article should be improved. I simply use paraphrased words for IT industry classification(s) that come directly from the largest and most well known industry research organizations. I would imagine the WP Cloud Computing article should do the same (or at least reference them). As for this article, I now have an internal WP link to the cloud computing article, in the event readers want to read more. However, I believe the classifications stand as they are simply because they come from the most notable industry research sources, on which almost all other major industry companies rely on (i.e. Gartner and Forrester). If cleaning up the cloud computing article to be consistent with industry references, I think we should talk about that, separately. --FGuerino (talk) 12:00, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Classification of technology consumers - again, I see what you are saying, but I don't see where you're going with this in the context of the article.

I tried to deal with cleaning up classification of consumers by moving, both, consumer and producer classifications under one broader section that spends more time describing the purpose of the two, before heading into them. I will continue to work on this. --FGuerino (talk) 14:37, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

• History and important events: I gave a brief comment about this one before, now here's a bit more depth.

• First, look at your table of content and the weight of the titles. The article's topic is "IT Industry" not "History of the IT Industry". Like this, it looks unbalanced

I see what your saying and I agree. I believe that the density of the section titles is more of an illusion than a reality, in that the content within the history section makes up about a quarter of the entire article. It's just that there were far more section titles in this one quarter of the article than there were in the entire article, as a whole. Anyhow, I do agree and so I restructured the History section to break things down by decades. The net result was a major collapsing of subsections. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 17:49, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

• Much of the history is not relevant to the topic of the article or feels like tacked-on trivia. Starting the history of the IT Industry with electricity in 1600? If I were of a sarcastic bent, I'd probably mention that it started with taming of energy when mankind discovered fire. I hope you get my drift here: The history relevant to the IT Industry starts in the late 1940ies, when commercial companies start producing commercially available IT products. When and why did IBM and HP switch over to IT systems? What company emerged in the 1950ies and 1960ies, only to merge or die in the 1990ies? What happened in the 2000es that further consolidated the players? That is the relevant history of the IT industry. Compression, video game computing and such are completely out of place here. There is however room at coarse-grained segmentation - Datacenter, the emergency, heyday and decline of the PC, the growth and maturing of storage markets, the birth of the networking giants and how Ethernet and TCP/IP became standards, the shift to IT services. Most of these are exposed in other articles but a short summary again looking at the rise and fall of the industry players as they missed key evolution or fell out of favour.

There are a number of things to address with this feedback bullet. First, and as mentioned in the response to the previous feedback bullet, I restructured the history to be broken up by centuries, rather than by topic areas. This handles part of the problem.

Regarding the feedback of covering things like what companies emerged or died, I definitely understand your point but I respectfully counter with the point that this would be an immense topic, all by itself, and the content to cover such a topic (even if it's just listing key companies that came and went) would be very long. However, to accommodate, I've added a section that lists different lists of companies by WP defined categorical groupings. While this is certainly not comprehensive, it definitely shows how large the industry really is. --FGuerino (talk) 14:11, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Regarding your feedback that certain topics shouldn't be addressed in this article because they're covered in others, that is why I have WP internal links to the other articles/pages. The goal is to give the reader an understanding of key events that drove the evolution of the industry with some succinct verbiage and to provide them with internal links to other articles for more details. It's the overview that helps readers understand the context of what makes up the industry, when things evolved, why they evolved, and so on. So, while you think that a topic like the introduction of video games out of place, it is in fact a critical event and a huge driver for the development of the industry because it spiked the demand for a great deal of what eventually went into, both, government and commercial marketplaces. We're going to civilly disagree on some topics and this is clearly one of them. What should or shouldn't be addressed in history (on any topic) will always be a matter of public opinion and something controlled by that article's author. I hope you can respect this and that we can agree to disagree.

Also, the intent is to build a solid draft that is "good enough" to be published and then iteratively improved after publication, and not to build a perfect article before publishing (as nothing would ever get published if we spent time trying to make each article perfect, right?). So, while I agree with many of your points, I believe that post publication iterative improvement will be a better way to handle such items. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 20:01, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

• Writing style: With English as a third language, I'm certainly not the best to comment, but there's two things I'd suggest. First, ditch bullet points in favour of prose. Second, there's a notion called Show and Tell - in many cases, you tell the reader, in slightly patronizing details, why something is important or significant - eg. The significance of this event is that hat the Ferranti Mark 1 would go on to be recognized by many as the first commercially available electronic computer that could be purchased outside of research funding governments. This is telling. Showing would be something akin to "In February 1951, the first commercially available electronic computer, the Ferranti Mk1, was delivered to the University of Manchester".

Regarding the issue of replacing bullets with prose. Well taken. I've been doing everything I can to do so. However, I've gone through multiple A Class articles (such as Distributed operating system and found that using bullets is common practice whenever referring to lists and where it makes sense to do so. So, I believe I can't get rid of all bulleted lists. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 14:45, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Regarding using "show" in favor of "tell"... This is invaluable feedback as it helps highlight personal writing patterns that I can certainly work to improve, upon. I've gone through the article and attempted to eliminate at least 6 instances of this problem. I'll keep looking for more and do what I can to improve the habit. Thanks for pointing this one out and for showing real examples of, both, the problem and how to correct it, as I feel your style for doing so helped improve the article and my writing. Thx. --FGuerino (talk) 13:44, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

These are my 0.02$ MLauba ^(Talk) 11:05, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

I agree with basically everything said above. In its current form the article looks like an amateur attempt at writing the textbook for high school students, and Wikipedia is not about that. I'd recommend the author of this draft to read about WP:NOTTEXTBOOK and especially about WP:ROC. 173.68.110.16 (talk) 01:20, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers. I read them and I'm trying to stay within their guidelines. My Best --FGuerino (talk) 01:13, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi MLauba, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to provide all of your feedback. This is great information, as it forces me to see things that I clearly wasn't thinking of. I'll be doing what I can to address the items in your list and I've already started working on some of the items but it will clearly take some time to be as thorough as I can. I hope you don't mind if I reach out to you, every now and then, with any questions I might have about your feedback items. -- My Best, --FGuerino (talk) 22:08, 3 September 2013 (UTC)